WINDOW SEAT TO THE SOUL
On a 17-day journey, three filmmakers touched every corner of the Indian rail network and every emotion of the general compartment traveller.
Samarth Mahajan, Director of The Unreserved and Creative Director at Camera and Shorts
I hail from Punjab. While studying mechanical engineering at IIT-Kharagpur, I really enjoyed making one-minute ad films at college fests. In 2014, a year after graduating, I took a leap of faith and moved to Mumbai to work in films. I teamed up with an old college friend, Ashay Gangwar, who had started a film venture called Camera And Shorts.
My first short film was called Kazwa – A Million Lanterns, a film about fireflies in a remote tribal village, and through which I tried to be a bridge between two disparate communities – the viewers of the film and those being filmed. I attempted to do the same last year when I made my first feature film, The Unreserved, a take on travellers of the general compartment of India’s long-distance trains.
I had wanted to make a film about the longest train journey in India, from Dibrugarh in Assam to Kanyakumari in Tamil Nadu. But it wasn’t turning out to be feasible and so I thought about what else I could do around the same theme.
I had previously done the Jagriti Yatra, a 15-day, 8,000-km train journey around India for social entrepreneurs. I thought about shooting in the different compartments of the train and observing how people from different classes behave.
While researching, I came across an article written by Mahatma Gandhi on the general compartment:
““Let the people…
who generally travel in superior classes,
without previous warning,
go through the experiences now and then
of third class travelling””
It was written in 1917, but I was shocked that the situation hadn’t changed in nearly a century. I realised that people in the general compartment are travelling that way because they don’t really have a choice.
Combining these ideas, we decided to do a pan-India journey focusing on the people in the general compartment.
Our initial plan was to travel Mumbai-Delhi-Dibrugarh-Kanyakumari-Mumbai. But on the day we were scheduled to leave, our train from Mumbai got cancelled because of the Jat agitation up north. I then came up with the idea of touching the extreme points of the railway network, which is how Okha and Kashmir became part of the plan. Two weeks later, we set out on a 17-day train journey across India.
Apart from me who was directing and coordinating the conversations, Rajat Bhargava was the assistant director while Omkar Divekar was the cinematographer.
With Rajat’s help, I had put together a list of every important regional issue in the states we going to travel through. I also read extensively on the art of making honest conversation and observed the work of non-fiction filmmaker Albert Maysles to understand how to capture reality on camera.
We did not set out to make a social issue-driven film. We did not plan to come back and show the railway ministry footage of the filth in these compartments because they are already aware of it, as is the public. But what people don’t know is the stories of the general compartment. We wanted to focus on very real stories and the kind of emotions you can draw from them.
I would start out by asking the passengers very basic questions such as where they were coming from, where they were going, what they do for a living, and what was going through their mind at that moment. We wanted to get a sense of their mindset and capture it. Many of them were facing the camera for the first time and thinking that the footage would go out to the world, they felt that they should talk about something that is most important to them.
I would often share my own experiences and though my struggles are certainly not comparable, sharing something personal would help break the ice and give them courage. I became vulnerable before I expected them to become vulnerable.
We had one of our most memorable experiences on the Kashmir leg. We spoke to a Kashmiri youth who was accompanied by two Kashmir University students. We had different destinations, but when they heard that we were visiting Kashmir for the first time, they changed their plan and said they would show us around. They had only spent a few minutes with us until that point. It was an unexpected incident that broke a lot of stereotypes.
Soon after I started talking to the youth, he openly admitted to supporting Pakistan, before going on to say that his brother is posted with the Indian army. When he started talking about the lack of electricity and jobs, I realised that his notion of supporting Pakistan was not derived from Partition or religion, but was based on livelihood. He said that Kashmiris don’t feel Indian because Indians often make them feel alien. In his village of 320 people, he said, half support India and the other half support Pakistan, and whoever gets a job switches loyalties to India.
I am no one to justify his opinion but I could empathise. People like to think in black and white, but Kashmir is a grey area.
There was a traumatic experience on the Delhi-Dibrugarh journey. We spotted a couple sitting in the toilet and they had baby with them. When I sat down to interview them, the man said that the baby was dead. He told us about how they had taken the infant to Delhi for treatment, but he had passed away en route and now they were bringing the body back to Bihar. We did not capture this on camera as we felt it would be insensitive.
On some routes, the compartment was extremely crowded. On the Delhi-Dibrugarh journey, there were about 300-350 people in a space meant for 90. Our equipment was limited to a camera and a mike. So while it was very difficult to move around and shoot, it was not impossible. I did some interviews while sitting on the luggage rack where my back had to bend according to the curve of the compartment.
Over time, we did get tired. We kept a 15-20 hour gap between trains, but two journeys were particularly tiring – Delhi to Dibrugarh took about 60 hours while Dibrugarh to Kanyakumar lasted 84 hours. I was enjoying the conversations but the subject matter was very heavy and it was emotionally draining. Eventually, the journey took a toll on our physical well-being as well. I blacked out during one conversation on the eleventh day. We took a day’s break before resuming shooting.
On the southern leg of the trip, we interviewed a transgender beggar. After the camera stopped rolling, he told us matter-of-factly that he is actually a computer science student, and does the rounds on trains for pocket money. It was an interesting nugget that we didn’t get on tape, but I had decided in advance I did not want to make people repeat things for the camera as it would not come out too naturally.
As far as aesthetics go, we knew that we would not be fully in control of camera angles and intrusions. But we decided to shoot in a way that the camera would focus on the person’s face. I wanted people to feel like they are observing and living these conversations. In a scene where a man is telling us the painful story of his daughter who has a brain tumour, the camera shakes a lot because vendors keep coming and going. But in the end, the film actually benefited from the chaos and it just added to the atmosphere of unpredictability that general compartments are all about.
In all, we captured 40-45 stories on tape. We narrowed it down to around 15 stories and then plotted the themes that we were addressing such as love, politics and religion and picked the most relevant stories for those topics. In the film, you see men from the north discuss dowry, a nurse who can’t marry the love of her life because he is from a different caste, a diabetic woman who, with her husband watching, admits to the pressure of having a male child, and an old man discussing the menace of the quota system, among other stories.
Even though many of the stories were not necessarily happy, it was not a depressing trip. Everyone smiles in the end after saying what they did, because it proved to be an outlet for them and they felt better for it.
Almost a year on, I still can’t summarise the impact the film had on me. It was a very liberating experience. I can no longer ignore the fact that there is this ‘other India’. Now, whenever I meet a cab driver or a bus driver, I have this urge to talk to them and understand what their life is like.
At a time when there is so much rhetoric on patriotism and love, I hope this film keeps the grey area alive. I also hope that viewers see the power of conversation and engagement and how talking to people can be easy. If you hear someone out, you understand their context.
People in the unreserved compartment are travelling that way because of some compromise. They are suffering in some way. Discussing these compromises brings out that true spirit of survival. Everyone in that compartment is suffering, but still surviving.
AS TOLD TO SIDDESH SHETTY
True Blue Talks screened this film and held an interaction with the makers on April 22, 2017.
To find out more, click here.
